Robotics Sector Deal Consultation & Workshop

In January this year, Government published a Green Paper on Building our Industrial Strategy. In it is set an ‘open door’ challenge to industry to come to the Government with proposals to transform and upgrade their sector through ‘Sector Deals’. Businesses rather than the Government are being encouraged to identify what companies need in order to enhance their competitiveness as a sector.

This is not about the Government providing additional funding; rather, it is an open call to business to organise behind strong leadership, like the automotive and aerospace sectors, to address shared challenges and opportunities.

Government is looking for businesses to collaborate with other stakeholders, such as universities and local leaders to produce a clear proposal for boosting the productivity of their sector, setting out detailed plans to address challenges such as:

delivering upgrades in productivity, including in supply chains;

promoting competition and innovation;

facilitating long term investment and coordination between suppliers and primes;

accelerating growth across the value chain, including by identifying where the greatest value can be gained from technology development and investment;

developing and growing the strengths of particular clusters;

increasing exports; and looking at how we can use trade and investment deals to help the sector;

commercialising research across sectors; and

boosting skills and the number of high value, high productivity jobs.

To help provide evidence for the proposed Robotics Sector Deal, the Robotics Sector Deal Proposal Team would like to understand what activities are taking place in the UK that are in alignment with the existing RAS Strategy, and what new ones could be enabled by Government action. To this end they are reaching out to the RAS Community to collect this information through an online survey questionnaire which we would encourage you to fill in here. The answers will be collated to provide a high-level synthesis of the survey rather than providing the full detail.

(If you are not familiar with the way we use the terms Asset, Skills, Coordination, Clusters and Challenges, then please have a quick look at the RAS UK Strategy here.)

Additionally, on 6th September from 13:00 – 16:00 a Robotics Sector Deal Consultation Workshop will be held in London. The Sector Deal Proposal Team would like to share with the Robotics Community the structure of the proposed sector deal and provide another opportunity to gather your inputs to feedback into the proposal process, especially around the mechanisms of the deal and projects that it could enable. The Sector Deal Proposal Team are particularly keen to hear from people who have provided answers to the consultation survey questionnaire.

Register your interest to attend the workshop here and please save the date. Attendees will receive confirmation of their place on Wednesday 30th August.